France to re-join NATO core

France will re-enter NATO’s integrated military command, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy announced this afternoon. He said that the move was “in the interest of France and of Europe”.

France’s return after more than four decades had been expected for some time, but the president’s speech at the École militaire in Paris – a defence college – was the first explicit announcement. The step is to be formalised at NATO’s sixtieth anniversary summit co-hosted by France and Germany on 3-4 April.

“The moment has come”, Sarkozy said, for France no longer to “exclude itself”. “Those who are not there are always in the wrong,” he said.

France’s national assembly is to debate the step next Tuesday (17 March). It faces opposition from both left and right. France left the integrated command – though not the alliance itself – in 1966, when General Charles de Gaulle was president, because it was unhappy with the US’s predominant role in the alliance.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s secretary-general, “warmly welcomed” the announcement, made at a conference he also attended. De Hoop Scheffer, whose term in office ends later this year, said that Sarkozy’s move represented “both the culmination of a steady rapprochement with NATO on France’s part over the last 15 years and a new boost to relations between France and the Alliance just a few weeks away from the Strasbourg/Kehl Summit, at which NATO will face strategic decisions about its future.”